Thursday, August 02, 2007

Somedays

Some days I'm really glad I work in an office which is completely sheltered from people. Most of the time it sucks, but some days it's good.

I really don't want to hear updates about every press conference, some hearsay about how many people were killed, speculation about how long recovery efforts will take, and especially some politicians score political points by demonstrating "leadership" by posturing on camera. Yes, it's terrible that a bridge collapsed, and it's awful that people lost their lives for no good reason. But does it really mean that Iraq is pushed completely off the front page of CNN.com for the first time in 4 years? Or does it just make more marketable news since it happened so close to home?

Of course I feel like a callous asshole just writing that last paragraph, but I don't know what else to say. It's certainly a tragedy, and I'm sure I would/will feel differently if anyone on that bridge was close to me, but...can we stop with the nonstop coverage? Do the first 8 CNN.com stories need to be related to this? There was nothing else remotely newsworthy that happened? Yes it sells papers and generates pageviews but just let the rescue workers do their job, get some answers as to how this happened, and stop exploiting the situation.

EDIT: I'm only picking on CNN.com because they're one of the largest 24-hour news presences. And I certainly understand that they would lose viewers to rivals if they didn't have round-the-clock coverage of this tragedy. I guess it's just one of those human-nature things that I don't understand...

Halley, it's almost like that time that you were in Hawaii during an earthquake and were upset that you couldn't get the morning paper and I was like OMG I haven't heard from Halley in like 2 hours, I wonder if she's alive! It's kinda like that.